


Skin Horse

by bullroars



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Actual Murder, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Attempted Murder, Blood and Gore, Canon Lesbian Relationship, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Female Character of Color, Graphic Description of Corpses, Lesbian Character, Mild Language, Pregnancy, Survival, loudly implied cannibalism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 21:51:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3224720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bullroars/pseuds/bullroars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Margot gets away.  </p>
<p>(Or, Margot is more clever and determined to survive than anyone gives her credit for, Judy lets her name the dog, and it's hard to raise a kid when you're by yourself and everyone you know is a cannibalistic mass murderer.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skin Horse

**Author's Note:**

> Or, the "why are you doing this when you have literally 800 other things to do" fic. I love Margot Verger a lot, okay. 
> 
> Part 1/2.

Skin Horse

 

Margot gets away.  Just barely--Carlo's car misses hers by thin inches, careening into the guard rail while she skids, almost spins off the road, but _makes it._

She accelerates, tires slipping on ice, and doesn't look back.  She puts almost two hundred miles on her car driving in circles, confusing any GPS devices her dear brother might have hidden, and tosses her phone and her credit cards out the window somewhere north of Baltimore. Then she turns around.

Virginia, unlike Baltimore, is all back roads.  There are plenty of places to lose Mason's dogs.

She leaves her expensive, easily recognizable car at a bar in Langley and takes a cab to Quantico, and then another out to Wolf Trap.

Margot insists that the driver let her out half a mile from Will's house.  He puts up a token argument--she's a pretty young woman, he wouldn't feel right leaving her alone in the dark, yada yada--but Margot smiles sweetly and feeds him some crap about her fiancé, grabs her bags, and goes.

The walk is terrifying.  Every snap and rustle is Carlo, every looming shadow Mason with his pigs.

She tightens her grip on her bag, and on the slim little revolver tucked into her coat.  She's ready, if he comes for her tonight.

It's several long, dark minutes before she sees the lights in Will's house and hears the dogs start barking, and Margot nearly falls over, relief a drug in her veins. 

She's made it this far.

There's the sound of paws in the snow and then the pack is around her, noses wet and friendly. 

Will is standing on his porch with a shotgun in one hand. "Margot?" he says, surprised. 

Margot looks at the shotgun, and then at the happy, wiggling pack.  _So not a welcoming committee, then._ She raises an eyebrow.  "Expecting someone else?"

Will shrugs, smiling crookedly.  "Of course not," he says, whistling to his dogs, and lets her inside.    
"What brings you out here at two in the morning?"

"Mason's going to k-- he'll try to hurt the baby."  No point in sugar-coating it.  Will deserves to know what kind of danger he's letting into his home, and Margot needs his protection. 

(She saw the look on his face, when she'd told him he could be as involved with her baby as he wanted.  He, already, is _attached._ )

Will carefully closes the door and looks Margot up and down.  There's a familiar darkness in his eyes.  "Were you followed?"

She shakes her head.  "There was a guy, but I lost him back in Baltimore.  I took the long way around." She's been driving since ten o'clock. 

"Does Mason know about me?"

Margot snorts.  As if she'd tell Mason his name, no matter how deeply entangled Will's become in the Verger family drama.   "Of course not," she says.  "I'm not stupid.  He won't kill me, but he will kill you."

Will notices her choice of words.  Not _could_ or _would_ , but _will.  Mason will kill you._ His mouth tightens.  "You can't stay here," he says quietly.  "There's--there's other things at play right now.  Things more important than me or you."

"More important than the baby?"  Not even a baby yet, a tiny, formless clump of cells, but Will's face changes all the same, just like Margot knew it would. 

"I'll protect you," he says, and she believes him.  "You just... can't stay here.  Not right now."

"Mason doesn't know about you."  Margot wonders what this _thing_ is that's got Will so riled up.  Surely no one would notice if Margot moved in?  It's not like Will has any neighbors, and between the pack of dogs he lets run loose and his reputation as an almost-killer, she doesn't see him getting many visitors.  "I took two different cabs and walked to get here.  He won't find me."

Will does something strange with his hands, flicks them outward, fingers curled.  "He will," he says, and the darkness is back in his voice.  "He'll go to Dr. Lecter, and Dr. Lecter will point him to me."

Margot startles.  One of the dogs, mottled brown with a bottle brush tail, licks her fingers gently.  "Dr. Lecter?  He wouldn't--"

But she remembers Will and whiskey, asking, _Did he deserve it?_

_What do you think?_

"Oh," says Margot.  "Hannibal Lecter's the 'other thing,' isn't he?"

Will nods.

"You're going to try and kill him again."  It's not a question--Will's a lot like her, she's found.  And if Hannibal Lecter is anything to Will like Mason is to her, he'll try to kill him again, he has to. 

"Catch," Will corrects, but his eyes slide away from hers and Margot smiles.

"Okay, so I guess I can't stay with Dr. Lecter, then.  I wouldn't peg him as the type to harm an unborn baby, though."  Lecter was unusual, sure, and fond of unconventional therapy, but Margot hadn't thought him cruel or vicious, not like Mason.

_I really need to stop holding every monster up to the Mason Verger Standard._ Some monsters were going to be worse, or not as bad, or different breeds of monster entirely.      

Will, she thinks, and herself too, are different monsters entirely. 

"There's a lot of things he is that you wouldn't peg him as," Will mutters, dragging a hand down his face. 

Margot looks at Will expectantly.  The brown-mottled dog licks her hand again.

"If it makes you feel any better," Will says, after a moment, "what's happening to you--the baby, Mason hunting you, all of it--it's not your fault.  None of it is.  It's mine, and Dr. Lecter's."

Margot stares at him, startled.  "Excuse me?"

"Hannibal--" Will stops, takes a breath, begins again.  "He doesn't like me having... attachments to people who aren't him.  And he likes to play god.  Wind people like you and me up, watch us go.  He probably wanted to see what you would do, and what I will do."

_Will_ again.  Not _would,_ not _could,_ what I _will do._ Margot bares her teeth.  "It's not your fault," she says.  "Dr. Lecter didn't know I'd use you to get what I wanted."  _Needed._

Will opens his mouth, probably to spill some self-sacrificing, noble _bullshit_ that Margot has zero interest in hearing. 

"Don't," she snaps, Verger imperiousness and exhaustion and fury bleeding over.  "I made my own choices.  Dr. Lecter didn't tell me anything I hadn't already thought."

"I--"

" _Don't._ My decisions led me here.  _Mine._ I chose to have a child.  I chose to fuck you to get one.  I'm choosing right now to trust you to hide me, so that I have a chance to raise my son, kill my brother, and get on with my life!"

_Not you, not Dr. Lecter, not Mason,_ me, she wants to snarl, but does not, cannot.  She takes a deep breath, softens her voice, and says, "I don't need your pity.  I don't need your excuses or your explanations. I don't _care._ I need your protection, and that's it."

Will closes his mouth and holds his hands up in defeat.  "Point taken," he says quietly, then sighs.  He pads to the door and locks it, the dogs flocking to him. 

The mottled one stays with Margot, looking up at her curiously. 

"You can stay here tonight," he says, closing the blinds.  He doesn't put the shotgun away.  "Tomorrow--tomorrow I'll find somewhere for you.  Somewhere you'll be safe."

  1. Margot has nine months before she can even think about safe. 



She doesn't say anything but "Thank you," and Will takes her to the bed.  Half of his wall is still missing, covered in tarp and duct tape. 

"What did you say came through there again?" 

"A stag," he says, catching Margot's raised eyebrow, and she shrugs.  "Scared the hell out of the dogs."

After her outburst, things are disturbingly normal.  He offers her some cereal and gives her all the privacy his little house can afford.  Margot thinks it's ridiculous, and tells him so, because he has seen her naked, and Will blushes a kind of cute red and backpedals in to the kitchen. 

The dogs split themselves between Margot and Will.  Most gather at Will's feet around the kitchen table, but a few, including the mottled one, arrange themselves around Margot.  They're warm, and they afford Margot the illusion of safety. 

Will smiles, and in the dark he looks suddenly very soft.  "That's Winston," he says.  "I think he likes you."

"That's good," says Margot, reaching down to scratch the dog's ears.  "I think I like him to."

\---

Will's phone rings at six fifty-two and Margot reaches for her gun on reflex.

From the kitchen, Will gives her a strange look, phone pressed against his ear.  His hair is a mess and the shotgun is propped up against the table.

He didn't sleep.  Margot's a little flattered.

"Yeah, Jack," he says, and Margot relaxes.  She doesn't know a Jack.  Mason isn't on his way.

She touches her stomach briefly, a habit she didn't want to pick up but is picking up anyway, some vestigial sense of motherhood she didn't even know she had. 

Will makes a few agreeable noises, hangs up, and turns to Margot. 

"Work," he says, chewing his lip.  "I have to go, it's important.  I'll talk to Jack about finding a place for you.  You can trust him," he assures her, catching her brief flash of alarm.  "He's in charge of the BAU, he won't let anything happen to you." 

Margot forces herself to relax and waves a hand.  "Go," she smiles.  His concern is sweet, even if it’s not really for her.  "We'll be fine here, right, guys?"

The dogs pant happily.

Will nods curtly, some dark, hard mask coming down over his face.  When he speaks, even his voice is different.  All of the warmth goes out of him.  "I'll be fast.  There's food in the fridge.  Don' be afraid to use the shotgun.  There's a lot of dangerous animals around.  You never know which ones will try and get in the house."

Margot takes the warning for what it is--half-admission, half-permission--gives the hole in the wall another look, and makes herself some breakfast. 

Will goes.

The dogs try and convince Margot to part with some toast.  She gets up not long after he's gone, lets the dogs have the rest of her breakfast, and spends most of the morning pacing. 

She shouldn't have run like she did.  She should've planned it better.

Margot is smarter than Mason--she got their father's brains, good looks, and tolerable personality, really the lion's share of his good qualities.  But Mason inherited their father's cruelty, and he has some kind of low, vicious cunning alien to the Verger clan, some aberration in his DNA that even their father couldn't train out of him.

What Mason lacks in intelligence he makes up for with sheer, brutal enthusiasm. 

Margot should have waited.  Mason bores easily--sooner or later he would've found a new toy, lost interest in his dear sister long enough for her to quietly get pregnant, and she would've disappeared. 

This, this half-crazed flight in the dark, in the dead of winter, without a safe, long-term place to stay, was _stupid._ She's vulnerable, and she should've known better. 

Margot quietly leaves the house, shotgun in one hand, the other pressed flat against her stomach, and takes refuge in the barn.  It's locked, but Margot is clever, and the wood half-rotted.  It's not hard for her to pry a few boards loose, slip inside, and prop the planks back where they came from. 

She looks up, and can see why Will locked the barn.  There's a suit made of bones hanging from the ceiling.  Margot blinks.  It has teeth like a wolf and metal joints holding it together, broad, flat shoulders made of dull bone and shiny wire. Scratches and gouges decorate its arms and ribs.

Margot's not a betting woman--she's just plain unlucky--but still, she'd bet anything that this is the "animal" that tore a hole in Will's wall. 

A dingy, padlocked freezer sits beneath the bones, recently welded to the floor, and various power tools scattered around the barn.  Margot doesn't try to open it.

"Daddy's a killer too," she tells her baby.  She'd guessed, of course.  Margot comes from a family of monsters.  She's learned how to root out another.

Out of respect for Will's private carnage and a healthy desire to keep her DNA out of a potential crime scene, Margot slips out the way she came and goes to the dogs, letting them flock around her as she wanders the fields and the woods.

She feels calmer out here, surprisingly.  Will's got a decent-sized property, isolated, not a neighbor in sight.  The woods are thick and easy to hide in, and his pack, while panting and goofy now, has a few bruisers in it.  There are plenty of places to just watch and wait.

Margot excels at watching and waiting. 

Out here she has a vantage point, clear lines of sight to the house and the road, camouflage, the pack, the shotgun.  She looks back across the stiff, waving grass, to the little house standing like a boat in the sea, and imagines what it feels like to feel _safe._  

She usually doesn't feel safe outside of her own head.  When she was a girl she built a refuge in her memory, refined it, made it livable, and lived there safely for most of her childhood.  It was the only place Mason couldn't get at her.

Her first shrink called it her "mind palace."  Her family home could technically be considered a palace, she guesses, though she doesn't think of it that way. When Margot is there, every trace of Mason is gone.  All of his hideous paintings are burning on the lawn, his luxuriant bedsheets, his waistcoats and silk shirts, his ridiculous fucking scarves.  The fish tank has been drained, filled with flowers, the eel killed and cooked and served for dinner.  She takes a bite and her mouth waters.  She's broken all the martini glasses and eaten all the olives.  Every window in the house is open, letting in the sun.

When she walks from the house to the stables, Mason's pigs have all been slaughtered and strung up, black blood dripping off their hooves.  They watch Margot pass with beady eyes. 

There are no horses in the stables.  Margot walks to the high platform above Mason's maze.  The barn is full of shrieking, the ghosts of pigs gorging themselves.

She flicks a switch, the pulley groans, and Mason rises from the maze. 

His throat is cut like a pig's and everything below his waist is gone, chewed away, bones and all.  A few feet of ragged intestine, ropy, glistening, and half-chewed, dangle from his torn belly. 

There's blood everywhere.

Margot looks into Mason's eyes and lowers him down again.

She leaves him, locks the stables, smiles, and takes her son's tiny hand, leading him back to their home.

\---

When Margot comes back to herself, it's because of the barking.  Loud, pitched, and continuous, punctuated here and there by a snarl or a yelp. 

Margot goes very, very still.

She's in the field, pack scattered between her and the house, and all of Will's dogs have their hackles up, teeth bared, eyes locked with Carlo's.

  1. Margot has just a split second to take it all in--Carlo and three men, unloading from expensive black sedans, thick, white bandages wrapped around Carlo's neck.  She feels a quick flash of pleasure--he didn't escape that car accident unscathed--which is just as quickly replaced by _terror._



_Mason knows._

Carlo sees her, points, and shouts.  " _Eccola!_ " 

Margot runs. 

The pack doesn't follow, preferring instead to swarm the trespassers.  Shouting and howling and gunshots fracture the winter calm behind her. 

_They're going to hurt the dogs._ Margot thinks, _Better them than me.  Better them than my baby._

The shotgun slaps the back of her legs, and the shoes she's wearing aren't made for running in the woods in the snow, but desperation and determination get her to the trees, where she skids down a steep ravine and scrambles back up for higher ground. 

Behind her, the dogs' howling is broken by screaming.  No more gunshots.

Margot keeps running. 

Contrary to every horror movie cliché in existence, Margot doesn't trip.  She doesn't stumble.  She doesn't fall.  There's too much at stake, and Margot's life is not a horror movie.  Horror movies end, and Margot plans to keep living for a long, long time.

Unfortunately, not even her single-minded determination to _get away_ is enough.

Someone very big and very heavy slams into Margot, a two-handed shove that actually knocks her off her feet and sends her spinning into the snow.  Margot falls hard on her side, pain bursting from her hip to her jaw, but she's had worse and she needs to _move_ \--

The kick to her chin pretty much puts and end to _that_ plan.

Margot spills forward into the snow, ears ringing, mouth full of blood.  She tries to get back on her feet, to reach for the fallen shotgun, but her legs won't move and her hands won't do more than twitch, fingers kicking like the legs of a squashed spider, 

_Get up,_ she tells herself viciously, _get up, get up!_

The man is speaking, voice distorted, high, and loud.  Margot manages to rise to her knees, spits blood.  She tries to stand and collapses back into the snow.  All of her limbs are shaking wildly.

_I'm not going to die here,_ she thinks.  _They won't take me, they won't, I won’t let them, I will not die here_ \-- Because that's what will happen, if this man grabs hold of her again.  If they take her, Mason will take everything.  The baby--embryo, blastocyst, little more than sperm and egg--her freedom, any chance of her getting away every again, and Margot will _die_ in Mason's house, without cleansing it of him and baptizing it with his blood.

Carlo's thug grabs her by the back of her coat, hauling her up like a disobedient kitten, and Margot comes up like a mountain lion, spitting, clawing, forcing her body into action.  She slashes her nails down the man's face and blood follows.  He _howls._

His backhand isn't surprising.  Margot spits out more blood and keeps fighting, manicured, sharp nails digging into the soft flesh of the man's chin and flabby throat.

"You _bitch,_ " he screams, and Margot replies with a sound that's barely human, blood-clogged and continuous. 

_Just a little more,_ she thinks, trying to pull his throat out with her nails alone.  _C'mon, c'mon, c_ 'mon--

Mason's man screams again, louder this time, and Margot risks a glance down.

Winston is there, his teeth in the man's thigh, and the man wails curses.

Margot lets go of his throat and drives her fingers through his right eye with all of the force she can muster.

There is a moment of resistance, her fingers pressing an unyielding surface, and then something gives, blood and viscous fluid bursting over Margot's fingers.

The sound her attacker makes isn't even a scream; it's something rawer, more primal and agonized, and it goes on and on as he lets her go, staggering back, hands over his face.

Margot falls into the snow again, hands and knees, white turning brilliant red all around her.

"Winston," she tries to call.  Her voice cracks and breaks.  _Pull it together, Verger._ She takes a second to gather herself, letting fear settle into her mouth, her bones, every bruise and scar she's collected under Mason's care. 

"Winston, come," she says, and Will's dog lets go, bounding to Margot's side.  He snarls at the wounded man.

"You  bloody bitch," the man gasps, muffled by his hands and his blood.  " _Ti ammazzo!  Ti ammazzo!_ "

He peels his hands away from his face.  Satisfaction thunders through Margot at the sight, ruined, raked cheeks and a punctured eye weeping blood and thick, clear liquid, sclera dangling like a popped balloon.

"I'll kill you," he growls, and Margot's hands find the shotgun.

"No, you won't," she says, and fires twice.  The first shot catches him in the shoulder.  At five feet the crack is deafening.  Bone and bits of muscle fly free, torn from his body, blood misting through the air.

The second shot slams into his neck and then he doesn't have one--gristle and blood spray and he falls, kicks, and goes still, gurgles and bubbles of blood hissing and spreading across the frozen ground. 

Margot sits down heavily, shotgun kick driving the breath out of her body.  Winston whines.

"Good boy," says Margot thickly, around her swelling lips.  "Good, good boy."

He licks her cheek, still whining.

"I had a grandfather named Winston," she says.  She feels punch drunk, fear and adrenaline making her whole body shake.  "He wasn't nearly as brave as you are, I don't think."

Winston sits beside Margot and she sits by a dead body, blood steaming up off the snow.

She doesn't know how long she sits there before Carlo finds her, blood on his cheek and his coat hanging in bitten tatters. 

"Run into the dogs?"  Margot grins at him, teeth red.  Winston snarls.

Carlo looks at Margot and the ruin of her attacker.  "Tomasino," he says, more dumbfounded than anything.  "You killed--?"  His disbelief solidifies into shock, then outrage.  "You killed Tomasino!"

Margot smiles.  "Yep," she says.  "Sure did."

"I'll," Carlo begins, face reddening, but he never takes more than a step forward.

Will Graham comes out of the trees behind him, kicks his knees out, grabs his hair, and puts a knife to Carlo's throat. 

"Wow," says Margot, "that's kind of hot."

Will takes in the blood on her face and the dead man in the snow.  "Margot," he says very quietly, an evenness in his voice that she envies.  "Was this man going to kill you?"

"Yes."  No, probably not, but as good as.  Carlo would take her back to Mason if he got the chance.  Will doesn't need to know that.

"You can't kill me," Carlo splutters, red-faced even as the knife settles into the curve of his collarbone.  "Mr. Verger will--"

"God," says Margot, "shut him up already."

Will looks Margot in the eye--really looks, and there is something with teeth and claws swimming there, antlers as tall as trees--tilts Carlo's head back, and obliges her.  "He shot two of my dogs," he says darkly, wiping the knife on Carlo's jacket. 

"I'm sorry."  And she is.  Winston whines and she scratches his ears.  Her fingers are still trembling. 

"They'll live."  Will, with a strength that surprises her, drags Carlo's body out of the open and into a tangle of bushes.  He leaves her attacker where he fell.  Careful of the blood on his hands, Will tips her head back and gently examines the damage.  "You will too, I think."

Margot gives him a bloody smile.  "There are two others."

"Taken care of."

  "You're pretty calm about all this," Margot says thickly.  Her tongue feels heavy, lips uncooperative and slow.

Maybe it's just her brain.  Margot's pretty sure it's swimming around loose in there, kicked free by Tomasino.  She can feel her own pulse crashing in the hollow of her throat and the ragged edge of panic, but at a great distance, like she's stepped out of her skin and across the clearing. 

Will gives her a long, quiet look, and helps her to her feet.  "C'mon," he says, instead of, _Yeah, I'm totally cool with four brutally killed bodies on my property, it's fine, don't worry about it._ "Let's get you cleaned up."

\---

Margot meets Jack.  At least, she thinks she meets Jack--by the time Will gets her back to the house, she can barely see through one eye and her head is ringing like a struck bell, but there is definitely a man and he says, "Ms. Verger," gravely, and helps Will get her inside.

"What happened to the others?"  she asks, slurring. 

"Don't worry about them," Will repeats. 

Jack snorts. 

Margot takes that to mean that they're dead, then.  She can see the glimmer of gold on Jack's waist.  His badge.  Knowing Mason's thugs, they pulled on a cop and were shot down.  Unless Will got to them first.

She thinks of Carlo and his cut throat, and giggles.  

"I think she's got a concussion," says Will. 

Jack sighs.  "I'll take you to the hospital," he begins, but Margot growls, grabs at Will.

"No hospitals," she says, as clearly as she can around the blood and the swelling. 

"Margot," Will says, trying for reasonable, which is ridiculous because he has four dead bodies on his property and a suit of bones hanging in his barn.  He's plotting to kill his therapist, for god's sake, he doesn't get to be reasonable. 

She thinks she might have said that out loud because Jack makes a sound like a laugh or a groan and says, "Your face is going to need stitches, whether you want to go to the hospital or not."

Margot looks at Will through her unswollen eye.  "You do it," she says.

Will and Jack look at each other like they know they can't win, and Will sighs, tells Jack to clean her hands, and disappears into the bedroom.

He comes out with a bottle of whiskey and a fishing kit.  Between the concussion and the whiskey, Margot doesn't feel the needle sliding in and out of her face, which is weird because she watches Will's hands and the fishing line and she feels a tightness, but no pain. 

"This is gonna scar," Will warns.

"Good," says Margot.

He stitches along the left side of her chin and then again up across her eyebrow.  While he works, Jack cleans the blood of her hands.  He's also scraping under her fingernails, gently, collecting blood and  bits of skin in a little bag.

"His name was Tomasino," she says, looking at Jack.  Will scolds her for moving.  "The man I killed.  He was going to kill me.  His body's in the woods."

Jack looks at Will, who sighs.  "You can have that one," he says.  "I'm going to need Carlo." 

"Of course you are," says Jack, and he sounds resigned.

They finish cleaning her up and Will refuses to let her look at herself in his tiny mirror.  He gives her a huge, soft flannel shirt, settles her into an armchair, and promptly keeps her awake for the next five or six hours.

"What's your name?"  he asks her.  He patches his dogs up with deft hands.  "When were you born?  What's your brother's name?  What year is it? Where are you?"

"Margot Verger," she answers dutifully.  The pain comes back, lines of fire on her face and behind her eyes, but it's nothing she can't handle.  She hangs onto it, hand on her belly.  "1986. My brother's name is Mason.  It's 2014.  I'm in Wolf Trap, Virginia."

Jack leaves and then comes back.  "Taking care of the bodies," Will tells her. 

"Not Carlo's?"

"Not Carlo's."

Margot asks Will about himself.  She wants to know the other half of her son.  Will is ten years older than she is.  He is from Louisiana.  He can't tell her about his mother other than that she had dark, curly hair and she liked to sing.  His father was a strong man.  A fisherman.  He died when Will was a teenager.  Will grew up poor, but not unloved.  He's always been an outsider.  He is an empath.  Margot thinks that sounds like it's not a real thing and tells him so.  Will laughs and it sounds bitter.

In turn, Will asks her about herself.

"My father's name was David," she says.  "Mom was Mathilde--she married my father for his handsome face and because David Verger used to laugh."

"When did he stop?"

Margot smiles.  "When he realized the Verger line would end with the two of us.  Breeding was very important to my father.  There have been Vergers since 1382, did you know? 630 years of the Verger name, and all my father had to show for it is a daughter with my proclivities and a son whose particular brand of monstrosity can't be tamed or trained or put to useful work."

"Not something any father wants," Will says. 

"It killed him," she says, bluntly.  Margot's memories of her father are distorted and often contradictory.  His hand on her head, his hand on her shoulder.  A pat and a shove.  He laughed and screamed.  Loved her, and hated her, and loved her even though he left her to Mason. 

Will looks away.

Margot's not sure, but she thinks after that she asks Will how many people he's killed. 

Will's eyes in the woods, she remembers, had teeth.  "Less than your brother," he says, finally.  "But more than you."

"What are you going to do with Carlo's body?"  Jack is still gone.  She doesn't think Will would answer, if Jack were here. 

"I don't know."  He sounds honest.  "Eat it, most likely."

"Oh."  Margot turns that over.  "Is Dr. Lecter the cannibal, or are you?"

"Hannibal," Will says, "though one of his favorite pastimes is passing the condition onto others." 

"What does a person taste like?"

Will laughs again, like his throat is full of broken glass.  "Honestly," he says, "I couldn't tell you.  My palate's not refined enough to know the difference." 

"Are you crazy?"  She asks.  She can see it now, claws in Will's hands, antlers with bloody tines rising from his back like a forest.  His skin is grayish black.  Margot is struck by a sudden sense of deja vu. 

"Yes."  Will tilts his head, and there is something standing just behind him that was in the room the night Will and Margot slept together.  His monster, she thinks.  "Are you?"

"Of course," she says.  She looks down at her stomach.  "Some legacy," she tells her son. 

Will doesn't say anything at all. 

When Jack comes back, Will stands.  "I have to go," he says.  "Dr. Lecter will be expecting me.  It's been a few hours, you should be alright to sleep.  Jack is going to stay here with you, alright?"

"I've found a safe place for you," Jack adds.  "Will is going to take you when he gets back."

"Where?"  she asks.

"Far from here," Will promises.  To Jack, he says, "She’ll testify against him, you know," and then he's gone. 

“Testify against who?”  Margot asks, and Jack turns an interested eye on her. 

He leans forward, fingertips steepled together.  “You’ll testify against Hannibal Lecter?”

  1. Margot deliberates.  He _did_ tell Mason where to look for her.  Tonight’s mess is his fault.  And if it gets her the protection of the FBI brass… “Anything you want,” she says.



Jack leans back.  “What information do you have on Lecter?”

“He told me to kill my brother,” she says.  “He encouraged me to commit murder.”

“Explicitly?” 

“Explicitly enough.”

“And did you attempt to do so?”

Margot gives him a withering look.  “If I did, I wouldn’t be here.”

He buys that, nodding to himself.  “Your testimony will have more weight than mine or Will’s, if we don’t get any physical evidence,” he murmurs, almost just to himself.  Margot gets why Will’s testimony could be construed as suspect--he has tried to kill Dr. Lecter before, and clearly intends to try, try, try again--but she wonders why Jack’s wouldn’t hold much weight. 

“Just tell me when,” she says. 

Jack helps Margot into the bed.  He doesn't let her look at the mirror either.  The dogs climb into bed with her, all noses and soft paws. The pain is less of a fire and more of an ocean now.  If she lets it, it'll rock her to sleep. 

"Thanks," she tells Jack.  "For helping me, and for... doing whatever you did with the bodies."

Jack smiles, crookedly.  "You know," he says, "when I first got into this job, I thought that I'd be catching murderers, not aiding and abetting a budding serial killer and his pregnant girlfriend."

"Funny how that works," Margot yawns, not bothering to correct Jack.  Will must have told him that she's pregnant.  Played with Jack's sympathies.  Will and Margot are big kids.  If they got themselves in over their heads, Jack might not be inclined to help out, but an unborn child?  Innocent.  Worthy of protection.

When Margot first met Will, she thought he was soft and kind of helpless.  She's glad to know that she was wrong.  

"You must really want to catch Dr. Lecter, huh?"  she says, and she's under before Jack can respond.

\---

"Margot," says Will, scant hours later, "time to go." 

She's bundled into Will's crappy car before she even really knows what's happening.  Jack says goodbye and departs.  The dogs lick her fingers. 

She's still half-asleep, pain-hazy, by the time dawn breaks over the road.  Will's car doesn't have a clock but Margot asks and he says, "six fifty-eight," quietly. 

Around seven thirty the radio crackles, _"Margot Verger, oldest child of the late David Verger, meat packing giant, has been reported missing.  She was last seen in Baltimore, Maryland.  She is believed to be pregnant._ ” 

“In a few days, they’re going to find trace elements of your blood in Mason’s house, pending an anonymous tip," Will grunts.  They're somewhere in West Virginia, she thinks.  The sun's slowly coming up over the mountains.  She doesn't look in the side mirror. 

"What did you do with the bodies?" Margot asks, frowning. 

“They’re in the morgue at the FBI.  Jack shot two of them in self-defense, cut and dry.  We’ll both testify that the man you shot was directly threatening your life. 

“Oh.”  She'd expected something more impressive from Will.  He didn’t seem mundane--he seemed artful.  Inclined to make a statement. 

Will looks at her sideways.  "Asking Jack for four bodies would have been a little much," he says.  "He's willing to look the other way for one or two, but letting me become a mass murderer with a flair for the dramatic isn't something he would be able to tolerate, even if it did catch Hannibal."

"Hannibal is a mass murderer with a flair for the dramatic, isn't he."  She doesn't bother making it a question.  Some psychiatrist.  "And he wants you to become one, too."

"Believe it or not, he's lonely."  Will's voice is dry as a bone.  "If it makes you feel any better, I left Carlo's head in Mason's barn with an apple shoved in his mouth.  Hannibal thought it was a good idea."

"Oh Jesus."  She scrambles for the window and throws up, then retches for a while after everything else has come up.  Will pulls over and awkwardly rubs her back. 

"I'm sorry," he says, a little frantic, "I shouldn't have said--"

"I don't care what you did to Carlo," Margot growls, roughly.  Everything feels disconnected, like she's not a part of her body anymore.  When Mason broke her arm after she tried to kill him, Carlo laughed.

It’s not the image of Carlo's severed head sitting on the floor with a fucking apple in his mouth that does her in.  She doesn't know what's wrong, only that everything hurts and she's in a car with the fucking murderous father of her unborn child, and she's thinking about carving the flesh from Mason's bones in delicate strips and making a necklace out of them.

She wonders if Will would approve, and then realizes that she doesn't care. 

"What do you need?"  Will asks, after a moment. 

"To get the fuck away from here," she says, collapsing back in the seat, exhausted.  The pain's started back up again, and all she wants is to leave it behind.  She curls one arm around her stomach, protectively.  "And a ginger ale."

\---

Will gets her the ginger ale and they drive in silence until it's almost dark again.  She falls in and out of sleep for most of it. 

Margot dreams of riding horses, and they turn to bone underneath her, bone and blood and bits of clinging gristle.  She closes her eyes and when she opens them the horses aren't horses at all but great elk, and they have bloody hearts tied to their antlers.  One of them has Carlo's face, an apple shoved in his mouth.

The one Margot's riding has Will's face.  His eyes shine in the dark.

The pain in her belly and Will gently shaking her shoulder wake her up.  It's full dark now, a smattering of stars in the sky. 

It's colder here than it was in Virginia.  When Margot steps out of the car her breath freezes in her throat and she coughs.  "Where the hell are we?" 

"Eau Claire, Wisconsin," Will says.  They're parked in front of a small, snug house in a row of small, snug houses.  The lights are on. 

Margot looks at Will, entirely unimpressed.  " _Wisconsin?_ "  she hisses. 

Will shrugs.  "Jack says that this is the safest house he can think of."

She snorts, disbelieving.  This house looks like a strong wind would knock it over, let alone Mason Verger.  She felt safer in Will's house with his shotgun and his dogs and his monster. 

Of course she doesn't say that.  She hurts too badly to argue, and at the very least she can rest here for a day or so before Mason comes knocking.  Duluth isn't too far.  She has ten thousand in cash, stashed in her suitcases.  Enough to buy a plane ticket somewhere else, somewhere Mason won’t ever find her.

"It's two and a half hours to Duluth," Will says, like he can read her mind,  "and from there you can fly across the country or drive another four hours north to Thunder Bay."

"Who all knows about this?"

"No one."  Will knocks on the front door, adjusts his glasses.  "Me, Jack, and whoever he called off-book to get the house set up for you."

_Two too many,_ Margot thinks.  The door opens and a thin, tough-looking woman is standing in the doorway, her hair pulled back into a severe bun and windburn on her cheeks.  She lets them inside.

"I'm Martinez," she says.  She's got a politician's handshake, quick and impersonal.  Martinez gives Will a dirty look.  "What happened to you, honey?"

Margot must be a sight, with her bruises and her stitches and the dried blood she can still feel in her hair.  She grins anyway, all swollen lips and teeth.   "You should see the other guy."

Martinez raises an eyebrow.  To Will, she says, "Everything's been set up according to Crawford's specifications.  Federal-grade security system's good to go, all she needs to do is pick a pin and scan her prints in.  I've notified the LEOs, they'll be performing rolling surveillance day and night."

To Margot, she says, "As far as the local PD knows, you're the daughter of a California crime boss seeking protection.  You're listed as Mary Caprici in their records and a very detailed, convincing backstory has been provided for you.  I don't know who you are or why you need protection, so no one will be able to torture your name out of me.  Here's a wedding ring."

Margot blinks.  "Thanks?" 

The older woman nods.  "I've never lost a witness," she says gravely, eyeing Margot, "who followed the rules.  We'll go over them after you clean up.  Mr. Graham, my regards to Crawford."

Will nods.  "Mary," he says, and there's that hard sincerity in his eyes again, "I'll come back here once I've taken care of everything, alright?"

_Taken care of everything,_ she thinks.  "Don't kill him."

"I--"

"Do not," Margot says, slowly and clearly, "kill him.  He's not yours to take care of."  _He's mine,_ she thinks, and makes sure she's holding Will's gaze so he can see it, so that he knows. 

Finally, he nods.  "I won't," he promises, and then promises again.  "You'll be safe here.  I won't let anything happen."

Then he's gone and Martinez is guiding Margot up the stairs, towards an ancient shower.  She hears Will's car leave. 

_Fucking Wisconsin,_ she thinks.

\---

She's embarrassed to admit it, but Margot doesn't really remember much after Will leaves.  She's always prided herself on her observational skills--they've been life-saving, from time to time--and her ability to remember things, but the night after Will drives away is a blur.

She showers and stares at herself in the mirror for a good long while.  Her face is a bruised, pulpy mess, one eye bulging, her lips puffy, a yellow bruise in the first stages of turning purple and violent across one cheekbone and a line of stitches marching down the opposite side of her chin.

_I've had worse,_ she tells herself.  She also tells herself that she's more upset that the injuries will force her to stay put longer than she is about the fact that one of her eyebrows will never be the same. 

With a face like this, she'll make an impression anywhere she goes.  Mason could find her.  All he'd have to do is follow the girl who looks like she went a handful of rounds with a meat grinder.  If she wants to stay hidden, she'll have to wait to make a run for it when she's healed, or at least until she can buy some decent concealer. 

She revises her plan to include at least a week in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and goes back downstairs. 

Martinez walks her through the security system and the rules.  She chooses a pin number, 2016, which is the year her son will be two years old and probably long enough for Mason to lose interest in finding her, and lets Martinez introduce her fingerprints to the system. 

The rules she mostly forgets, but she's heard it all before, just from a different master.  No contact with people outside.  No unnecessary spending or drawing attention to herself.  No phone calls, no emails, no fucking telegrams to anyone who isn't Martinez.

She is not given a car--she can buy one, when she's ready, that's not an issue--and she's not to leave Eau Claire, pronounced _Oh Clare,_ though she can wander the city if she wants. 

"Don't establish a routine," Martinez warns her.  "Stay in the house whenever you can.  You'll be okay as long as you follow the rules, alright?  I won't let anything happen to you?"

Margot can feel every beat of her heart in her jaw and the corner of her eye.  _You're alive,_ she tells herself, grimly.  _Buck up, Verger._ She smiles at Martinez.  "Sure," she says, "Sounds good."

\---

She is, by both nature and necessity, a planner.  Mason is not, but then Father's indulgence let him be impulsive and mercurial.  Margot didn't have that luxury.  Her life has been a series of plans since she was small.  Make it through high school.  Make it through college.  Make it through Mason.  Survive, survive, survive.

Margot is very good at surviving. 

So she settles into life in Eau Claire.  The first week she doesn't leave the house.  Martinez comes and goes, helping her get settled.  Margot learns that she's not a cop--she's not law enforcement at all--and that Martinez owes Jack Crawford one continuous hell of a favor. 

The neighbors stay away, seemingly pacified with Martinez's cover.  She gets used to wearing a wedding ring and practices answering to a different name. 

While she waits for her face to heal--which it is, though very, very slowly--Margot plans. 

She can't stay here.  She can't kill Mason until her son is born and even then she'd prefer to wait a year, maybe two, before going back for her dear brother. 

When she kills Mason--she doesn't allow herself to think in terms of _if_ \--it will have to be perfect.  If she kills him and goes to prison, or if she's even suspected of killing him and barred from her inheritance and a free life without him, all of this will have been for nothing. 

She needs _time._ Time to plan, time to make a safer place for herself, for her son, and she needs time to find a way to kill Mason and still get away with it.

She sincerely doubts that Martinez is willing to put her up for that long, no matter how much of a favor she owes Jack. 

What Margot needs is a place of her own.  The house in Eau Claire is... tolerable, she thinks, but it's not a permanent solution by any means. 

So she waits. 

By the end of the first week, her face has healed up enough that she can leave without looking like a prize boxer.  Margot makes a beeline for the closest library and spends a Sunday afternoon pouring over maps and demographic data.  Picking the perfect town.

Too small a town and she'd attract unwanted attention.  Too large and there'd be too many variables, too many people Mason could pay off. 

Finally, Margot settles on a town not too far from Eau Claire, and discreetly, with the cash she'd managed to get ahold of before her flight, begins to prepare. 

Martinez takes her to the hospital some time during her second week.  She's four weeks pregnant.  No one at the hospital knows what to make of her scars. 

The OB/GYN sees her face and clucks over her sympathetically.  "What happened to you, sweetie?" 

The cut on her eyebrow is straight, but the one on her jaw is broken into two ragged, uneven wounds, still red and raw-looking even ten days after Tomasino's boot. 

"Walked into a door," Margot says, in her best approximation of a bland Midwestern accent. 

The OB gets quieter after that, though her hands are significantly more gentle.  The baby's developing fine, she says.  Margot allows herself to relax. 

The nurse who replaces Margot's stitches is less able to get the hint. 

"Doc tells me you're pregnant," she chatters, plucking Will's stitches out.  It pulls unpleasantly.  "Jesus, what is this, fishing line?"

"Yes," says Margot, impatient.  "And yes." She's always hated hospitals.  Whenever possible, David Verger treated his children at home.  Margot's memories of hospitals are tied up with her mother's cancer and her most grievous injuries.  Her old scars feel tight and painful. 

"Lucky you didn't get an infection," the nurse mutters.  "Who did these?"

"Friend of mine," she says shortly.  "He didn't have many options at the time."

The nurse gets a strange look on her face and confines her questions to the baby. 

How far along is Margot?  Not very.  When's she due?  Mid-September.  Where's the baby's father?  In a warzone.  Boy or girl?  Too early to tell, but Margot thinks it's a boy.  Any names in mind?  Not yet, any suggestions?

After, she examines her new stitches in the bathroom mirror.  The cuts look cleaner now, less red and angry.  She practices applying concealer to them when she's alone at night. 

Within a few days, she can hide them completely. 

She disappears on a Thursday.  Mary Martinez books a flight out of Duluth to Seattle and from there to San Diego.  Margot pays a small, mousy woman four hundred dollars to take the flights.  She lies about a return ticket. 

Then she puts all of her money, her least expensive clothes, and a few personal items into one suitcase, rents a car under a name she found in the Yellow Pages, and drives to her new home. 

She has almost nine thousand dollars in cash, so the first thing she does is rent a nice apartment.  It's cheap enough, six hundred a month plus utilities.  Margot still has her fake ID from college.  It says her name is Louise. 

No one ever looks for women named Louise. 

She spends the next few days creating her new life.  It has to be convincing.  She needs a job, a personality, at least a friend or two.  She needs it to look authentic. 

Louise has short, mouse-brown hair and she's shy, but friendly enough.  She makes cookies for her only neighbor, Judy, and asks around local businesses for a temp job, desk work, anything, she doesn't mind. 

(It takes Margot three attempts to make the cookies even a little edible.  She tries to cook dinner once, burns everything, and resigns herself to two years of soup and grilled cheese.)

Judy likes the cookies, and Louise enough to take her shopping for apartment things and new clothes--"It's my first time on my own," says Louise, sheepishly--and to help her get a job. 

Louise opens a bank account and starts working as a receptionist in a dental office on a Monday, nearly four weeks after she leaves Baltimore. 

On the following Thursday, which is her off day, Margot sees her house on the front page of a newspaper and has to sit down. 

_Verger scion injured in accident,_ the headline reads, in loud, gleeful type. 

_Injured,_ Margot reads, half-frantic, _not dead._

Mason is paralyzed, the paper says, and apparently mutilated by the pigs he so adores--good--but still alive.  Traces of the missing Margot’s blood were found in the house.

"Will fucking Graham," she mutters, tapping her stomach nervously.  She keeps an eye on the news, but Mason's returned home by the first week of March.  Nobody's killed him and fucked up Margot's life forever. 

She wonders, absently, what role, if any, Hannibal Lecter played in Mason's maiming, and then goes over to Judy's with a glass of apple juice and a plate of lukewarm, microwaveable chicken.  She doesn't think about it anymore.

\---

Judy drives Margot to her next ultrasound.  She likes to sing along to loud country music, even though, she says, "Country's a load of shit these days."

Margot raises her good eyebrow.  The stitches fell out two weeks ago, before Mason's accident.  She doesn't bother concealing the scars.  The latest theory is that Margot Verger was kidnapped.  There’s a low-level national search on for her.  She doesn't have any facial scars.  Louise does.  "So why do you keep listening to it?"

"My dad used to," Judy says.  Her hair, usually braided or straightened during the week, is allowed free on the weekends.  Judy tugs one curl, a nervous habit.  "It makes me feel like he's still here, you know?

Margot knows.  "Proof that you're not alone."

Judy pulls a face.  "You're so weird," she says, but she's laughing.  She doesn't mind how weird Margot is, and she brushes Margot's fingers encouragingly while the OB does the ultrasound. 

"Would you like to know the baby's sex?"  The OB asks. 

Terror nearly puts Margot on the ground.  It's an unfamiliar fear, a unique helplessness.  One that's kept her up nearly every night since she decided to pay Will Graham a visit.  She can kill Mason and kill Tomasino and burn her family home to the ground, if she wants, but she can't do anything to change the sex of the baby.  All she can do is cling to Judy's hand and pray.

"Yes," she gets out, breathless and raw.

The OB smiles.  "You're having a son," she says.  Margot cries.

"It's okay," Judy soothes, a little frantic.  She doesn't let go of Margot's hand.  "It's okay, it's going to be okay."

Margot smiles, stretching scars.  "Yes," she says, and for one shining, brilliant moment, she's not afraid.  "Yes, it is."

\---

"Holy shit, Lou." Judy drops her chopsticks with a clatter.  She invited Margot over under the pretext of picking out a dog from the local shelter but really to stuff Margot full of Vietnamese food which she craves beyond all rhyme or reason.  Her eyes are wide and fixed on the TV screen. 

The tagline scrawling across the bottom of the news is, _Esteemed psychiatrist and community pillar or bloodthirsty serial killer?_

"Hey, I've seen that guy on Food Network!"

Margot hisses Judy quiet and drops her food.  She turns the TV up with fingers that have gone numb to the second knuckle. 

" _...found in the home of Dr. Hannibal Lecter,_ " the newscaster is saying, a kind of horrible glee in his plastic eyes.  _"All four victims have been airlifted to Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment._

_"Dr. Lecter remains at large.  The FBI have come claiming Lecter is none other than the notorious Chesapeake Ripper, a serial killer who has terrorized the tristate area for the better part of a decade.  We go now to special correspondent Fredericka Lounds.  You have news for us, Ms. Lounds?"_

The screen cuts to a woman with fiery hair standing in front of a stately house.  Garish crime scene tape intersects in the background. 

" _Thanks, Ed.  I can confirm for you tonight that Hannibal Lecter has been definitively identified as the Chesapeake Ripper._ "

Ed says, " _And how can you confirm this for us?"_

_"Tonight's unfortunate events are the culmination of an undercover operation carried out by Special Agent Jack Crawford and Will Graham,_ " Lounds says, " _which I was brought into several weeks ago.  Will Graham has provided evidence that Dr. Hannibal Lecter is the serial killer known as the Chesapeake Ripper,"_ and Lounds pauses here, something gleaming in her eyes, " _and a cannibal._ "

Lounds and the male reporter keep talking, but Margot can't hear anything.  It's like the world has narrowed down to the picture of Dr. Lecter's face, the memory of Will's fingers, crime scene tape. 

"Oh my god," says Margot, scrambling Judy's computer.  

All of the news websites are blasting the same headlines. 

_FOUR INJURED BY NOTORIOUS SERIAL KILLER._

_RIPPER RIPS INTO FBI._

_FBI FAILS TO TRAP KILLER CANNIBAL._

Tattlecrime.com, run by the redheaded Freddie Lounds, seems to have the most exclusive scoop. 

Margot sees a picture of Will, soaked in blood and strapped to a gurney, and of Jack Crawford and two women being loaded into ambulances behind him. 

Lounds has pictures from the inside of Lecter's house.  The polished kitchen, the stainless knives, the broken glass and splintered wood, and the blood, blood, blood.

"Oh my god," she says again, numbly. 

_They didn’t get him.  They didn’t get him. They didn’t get him, he’s_ loose--

"I'm much weirder than you'll ever be," he'd said. 

_No fucking shit._

"The FBI didn’t catch him," she says, matter-of-fact, and throws up in Judy's bathroom. 

Over the next week, shocking and brutal details seem to infect every corner of Margot's new, normal life like deerflies on a carcass. 

Dr. Lecter had body parts in his basement.  Dr. Lecter fed human flesh and organs to half of Baltimore.  Dr. Lecter's confirmed death toll is fifty-six, and is suspected to be near or over one hundred. 

Jack Crawford, head of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, is in the hospital, critically wounded.  Alana Bloom, Lecter's supposed lover, and Abigail Hobbs, the girl everyone thought Will killed last year, are in the beds next to him. 

Will himself is in a coma, nearly disemboweled.  One doctor's been quoted saying, "At this point, it would be kinder if he just died."

Hannibal the Cannibal is all anyone can talk about. 

Margot throws up nearly every time someone mentions him for the next three weeks. 

_He knows I’m pregnant,_ she thinks, dizzily.  _He knows I’m pregnant and he’s loose and he wants to hurt Will._

She doesn’t know what she’ll do if Lecter comes for her.  He’s a monster you can’t run from--what he is is poison, and corruption, and she wonders if Lecter’s monster is infectious.  Even if he doesn’t come for her physically, Margot wonders if he’ll take her son anyway. 

Will Graham caught whatever madness the Ripper has, they say.  Let it seep into his skin and eat away at him.  He killed and brutalized a man--more than one, but the FBI doesn't know that--and fed him to Dr. Lecter.  Lounds calls it a "courtship." 

How much of Dr. Lecter's monster has Margot breathed in, sitting in his office?  Is it still with her, mixing with her own monster, with Will's? 

This is a new kind of fear for her.  Her whole life is fear, but this, this is something she's unaccustomed to thinking about.  _What if the baby is born worse than Mason_?

She gets three more ultrasounds, like she can catch her son's monstrosity before he's born, like he'll be born with antlers and an appetite and she can somehow stop it. 

No one catches Hannibal Lecter.

But he doesn’t show up at her doorstep either.   

Margot forces herself to calm down.  She has more immediate things to worry about, and her son will be her son.  If he's born too much a monster, she'll just have to teach him not to be.  That's where her father failed with Mason--he waited too long.  He turned a blind eye until it was too late.  Margot won't make his mistakes.  She never has. 

Will Graham is awake by the end of March and vanished to some remote fishing town on the coast by the end of April.  Margot's relieved.  She thinks about calling him, but decides against it. 

"Your dad's a fighter," she tells her son, fighting terror.  "Your dad survives monsters.  You will too, won't you?"

\---

Time goes on.  Mason doesn't come.  Will doesn't come.  Dr. Lecter doesn't come. 

Judy gets a dog, a big grinning black mutt, and lets Margot name him.

"I don't know," Margot says, doubtfully.  "I've never really named anything."  The dog whuffs, tail wagging.  Naming things has historically been a good way to get Mason to take them. 

"Lou," says Judy, disbelieving.  "You're six months pregnant.  Were you just gonna let the kid name itself?" 

Margot sighs.  "Wendigo," she says, scratching the dog behind its ears. 

"Morbid," Judy laughs, and Margot's stomach twists. 

It's been doing that a lot around Judy lately.  Her heart flutters at Judy's smiles, her laugh, the quick brush of her fingertips. 

_Bad vagina,_ Margot tells herself, but it doesn't stop her wanting. 

Her eyes follow Judy when they're in the same room. 

Finally, in mid-July, Judy asks her out to dinner. 

"Sure," says Margot, "that Vietnamese place or...?"

"No, Lou," Judy squeaks, and then coughs, embarrassed.  "Like.  Dinner.  Romantically."

Margot's good eyebrow goes up.  "Judy," she says, thinking _No one has asked me out like that since college,_ "I'm a mess of a person."

Judy shrugs, grinning cheekily.  "A hot mess," and the joke is so terrible that Margot says yes. 

(After she runs to the bathroom to stop herself from pissing in her pants.  Being pregnant _sucks._ )

\---

Margot's son is born on September 20th, 2014, after twenty-eight hours in labor. 

She holds Judy's hand and screams her head off for the whole thing. 

"I am never doing this again," she snarls, eighteen hours in.  " _Never._ "

Judy pets her sweaty forehead.  "Just go to your happy place, Lou," she says. 

Margot thinks about running Will Graham over with her shitty Toyota.  He's durable, he'd probably survive. 

Her son is born quietly.  He cries.  He's wrinkled and red and hideous, a dark curl smeared across his forehead, but he doesn't have antlers. 

"Do you have a name picked out?"  the doctor asks, after they've given her her son, after she's held him and affirmed that he is the most important thing in the world. 

"David," says Margot, for her father, and, "William," for his father.  "David William."

"Oh," says Judy, like she's surprised.  "That's a good name."

Margot is too tired to smile, but the hard thing in her heart, the monster, the mother, opens her mouth and says, viciously, triumphantly proud, "It is, isn't it?"

 

   

 

**Author's Note:**

> [Judy](http://cdna.tid.al/ef6b045387d95812ada5a4d9c9ceb37e19f58542_600.jpeg), who is utterly gorgeous. 
> 
> [Wendigo](http://www.thatmutt.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Lab-pitbull-mix-300x225.jpg), adorable, if unfortunately named, dog.
> 
> The title "Skin Horse" comes from the book _The Velveteen Rabbit._
> 
> _Regarding Jack's rather blithe attitude towards dead people--he did shoot two of them in self-defense and he knows that Margot did the same. I feel like after you let your employee cannibalize, brutalize, and put a body on display at the Museum of Natural History, you are really just okay with anything that might happen._
> 
> _How Margot's disappearance effects events back in Baltimore: Will decides to frame Mason for Margot's disappearance. Mason took offense and tried to kill Will. Hannibal just happened to be in Will's house at the time, and the result is pretty much the same as in regular canon. Mason also believes that Margot is alive, but Will tricked him into searching abroad and not the many cornfields of Wisconsin. Hannibal knows she's missing and was looking into finding her, but had to abandon that when he was forced to flee the country. "Mizumono" still happens, violently. I know the S3 trailer kind of implies that Abigail or Alana is dead but neither of them are here because I refuse._
> 
> _The FBI officially lost track of Margot. They don't know where she is. Eau Claire is a real place, and a very nice city--the town Margot is in now is made up because I am too lazy to shift through the entire set of US Census data on Wisconsin._
> 
> _David means "beloved."_


End file.
